Mamma mia!
Author claims to be descended from Mary Magdalene and Jesus
There’s something about Mary
The Da Vinci Code popularised the theory that Mary Magdalene married Jesus and bore his child. This wasn’t news to author Kathleen McGowan, who claims to have seen the proof … and to be Mary’s direct descendant. Alan Taylor hears her story
LIKE Martin Luther King, Kathleen McGowan had a dream. To be strictly accurate, she had “a series of haunting, recurring dreams that centred on the events and characters of the Passion”. In particular, Mary Magdalene, whom she refers to as “my muse, my ancestor”, appeared before her. In her new novel The Expected One, for which she has received a seven-figure advance, her heroine Maureen Pascal visits Jerusalem on Good Friday and has a vision of Mary. Exactly the same thing, McGowan insists, happened to her, since when she has had regular dreams and “waking visions”. She has become obsessed with Mary, “the most elusive character in the New Testament”.
McGowan has spent the past two decades in a quest to find out who she was and uncovering what she believes is the wilfully buried truth. Her mantra, like Maureen’s, is: “History is not what happened. History is what was written down.”
What most people know about Mary Magdalene is written down in the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which in total amounts to 14 niggardly mentions. All four gospels agree that she was present at the crucifixion and played a crucial role after Christ’s death. Though the details in each varies, all agree that Mary went to the tomb on the third day to anoint Christ’s body. They also agree that it was her that Christ, or an angel, told he was risen from the dead and to inform the disciples, thus making her the messenger who brought the news of the Resurrection, on which the cathedral of Christian faith is based. Without Mary Magdalene’s witness the past 2000 years would have been very different. Indeed, one could argue that without her Christianity would be meaningless.
But who was she and why did Christ put his trust in her? She is first mentioned in St Mark’s gospel, written around AD 66-8, which biblical scholars concur is the source for those of Luke and Matthew. As Mark describes the scene, Christ has just been crucified and deserted by his petrified male followers. He is alone on Calvary except for the “women looking on afar off”. Among those women is Mary, the mother of James; Salome, the exotic dancer; and Mary Magdalene. With others, they had followed Christ into Galilee and had “ministered unto him” and they now stood mourning him with the “many other women which came up with him into Jerusalem”.
It is, however, another reference in Mark’s gospel which Kathleen McGowan says has been “used against Mary” for two millennia: “Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.” This almost throwaway line, says McGowan, has led “to extreme claims about Mary’s mental state, including books dedicated to the idea that she was either possessed by demons or mentally ill”. It has also led to her frequent portrayal as a prostitute, largely due to her name being printed in such close proximity to the word “sinner” in Luke’s gospel. After all, unlike other women in the gospels, when she is identified it is not by a relationship with a man but by the place from which she comes, Magdala, a fishing village on the Sea of Galilee which, conveniently, had a reputation for loose living. Moreover, it seemed to suit the story that Christ, whose ministry was a byword in humility, should choose a fallen woman to proclaim his resurrection. For the church, it was interpreted as the ultimate act of forgiveness.
It was also, suggests McGowan, a historical injustice. For her, Mary is the first in a long line of women, including Marie Antoinette, Lucrezia Borgia, Boudicca and Mary, Queen of Scots, whom historians have defamed. Twenty years ago, McGowan began to research a book provisionally titled Maligned And Misunderstood, about women whose stories had been embellished and distorted mainly by male history makers.
“Many who did find their place in the history books were remembered as notorious villains - adulteresses, schemers, deceivers, even murderers,” writes McGowan in the afterword to The Expected One. “Were those characterisations fair, or were they political propaganda used to discredit women who dared to assert their intelligence and power? Armed with these questions and my escalating sense of mistrust for what has been academically accepted as historical evidence, I set out to write a book about infamous women who had been maligned and misunderstood through time.
“Mary Magdalene was initially just one of multiple subjects in my research. I set out to gain a greater awareness of this New Testament enigma in terms of her importance as a follower of Christ. I knew that the idea of Magdalene as a prostitute was prevalent in Christian society and that the Vatican had made some effort to correct that injustice. This was my starting point. It was my intention to incorporate Mary Magdalene’s story as one of many within the context of an entire body of literature that spanned 20 centuries. But Mary Magdalene had a different plan for me.”
By which McGowan means the visitations and dreams which she would have us believe made her the eponymous “expected one” to whom Mary would reveal her true story. And what a whopper it is. Kathleen McGowan’s Mary Magdalene is first married against her wishes to John the Baptist. When he is executed she marries Jesus, whom she calls Easa. She has two children, one by John - though he was not convinced he was the father. When Jesus dies on the cross she is carrying her second child and, presumably, his first.
McGowan believes that Magdalene was married to Jesus from the moment he was born, which must mean she was older than him. She was from the House of Benjamin, a descendant of Saul, making her the most important female in Israel. Under no circumstances, she says, was she a woman of easy virtue. “That was a later idea to disempower her and diminish the importance of women in the church.” Later, Mary went to live in the Languedoc region of France. Or so McGowan insists. Scholars, however, continue - as well they might - to be sceptical. Without printed proof their contempt for conspiracy theorists such as McGowan spreads like ivy.
Thanks to the indecent success of The Da Vinci Code, the news that Mary was married to Jesus and founded the Merovingian line will not make many headlines. Nor can there be any surprise about the centrality of Mary to the Bible story. As Susan Hawkins conceded in Mary Magdalen: The Essential History, she is “everywhere”, her name appropriated by Oxbridge colleges, East Lothian burns and innumerable chapels, hospitals and towns.
In the past decade-and-a-half, the literature concerning Mary Magdalene has expanded exponentially, including Claire Nahman and Margaret Bailey’s The Secret Teachings Of Mary Magdalene which includes “the last Gospel of Mary”; Bart Ehrman’s Peter, Paul And Mary Magdalene: The Followers Of Jesus In History And Legend; and countless Da Vinci Code spin-offs. In Norman Mailer’s Gospel According To The Son, she was the beautiful temptress of Christ and in Mimis Androulakis’s M To The Power Of N, He found her simply irresistible. In 2000, Maria Maddalena, a biopic, was shown on Italian television. Its heroine - disowned by her husband because she is infertile - becomes pregnant by another man but, on losing the child, attempts to commit suicide, after which she is redeemed by Christ.
Such poetic licence is perhaps inevitable because we know so little about Mary Magdalene. As Haskins notes: “The predominant image we have of her is of a beautiful woman with long golden hair, weeping for her sins, the very incarnation of the age-old equation between feminine beauty, sexuality and sin. For nearly 2000 years, the traditional conception of Mary Magdalene has been that of a prostitute who, hearing the words of Jesus Christ, repented of her sinful past and henceforth devoted her life and love to him. She appears in countless devotional images, scarlet-soaked and with loose hair, kneeling below the cross, or seated at Christ’s feet … or as the beauteous prostitute … sprawled at his feet. Her very name evokes images of beauty and sensuality, yet when we look for this creature in the New Testament, we look for her in vain.”
This, then, was McGowan’s starting point. How had Mary’s 14 mentions grown into such a fantastical legend? Cock-up? Conspiracy? The accumulation of circumstantial evidence accepted as fact? More often than not, says McGowan, it has to do with the way history is written and received. Sipping mineral water in a Dublin hotel, the bubbly mother of three sons, dressed in a cherry pashmina with her hair coloured to co-ordinate, recalls her experience in the late 1960s and 1970s when, as an idealistic young journalist, she moved to Ireland from Los Angeles to work as a reporter. What she saw with her own eyes, she says, often did not tally with what she read in the next day’s newspapers.
“You could read 10 different versions of the same event on the same day. I started to think, what happens if only one of those accounts survives? Or if one of those accounts has millions more readers than another? It becomes the truth. We’ve just made history. The more I thought about it, the more distressed I became.”
Talking to the families of the hunger strikers she came to realise how much of their history they kept to themselves, how much oral and traditional history was kept within a closed group, through suspicion of strangers and fear of being misrepresented and betrayed. History itself, she came to appreciate, was not to be trusted. Because you can authenticate documents does not mean you have an accurate picture of what happened in a given time and place. History was the prerogative of the wealthy, the powerful and the educated. “But that,” she says, “doesn’t tell us anything about the agenda of the person writing it.”
In the context of her research into Mary Magdalene, however, the authentification of documents is paramount. Though The Expected One is patently a novel, its USP is its author’s insistence that it is historically kosher and based on material which she has seen personally. In particular, she says she has been given access to Mary’s own gospel, which is not the same as that cited above by Nahman and Bailey.
“I was invited into the inner sanctum of secret societies,” relates McGowan, “and met with guardians of information so sacred that it astonishes me to this day that they, and the information they protect, exist - and have done so for 2000 years. I most certainly did not set out to explore issues that called into question the belief system of a billion people. It was never my intention to write a book that tackled a subject as weighty as the nature of Jesus Christ or his relationship with those closest in his life. Yet, like my protagonist, I discovered that sometimes our path is chosen for us. Once I discovered the Greatest Story Ever Told from Mary Magdalene’s perspective, I knew there would be no turning back. It possessed me then as it does to this day. I am certain that it always will.”
In essence, what McGowan set out to do - in a tale worthy of Indiana Jones - was reclaim Mary from the caricature contorted by history, the woman abused as a contrast to the saintly Madonna. But, as she is well aware, her reluctance - or inability - to be more forthcoming about the nature of her sources is manna to those who believe her story to be hokum. It was, she insists, not in her control. “I can’t produce the documents. I can’t walk in front of a camera and say, ‘Here they are’. I’m taking a lot of heat about that. What I said recently is that I don’t have these gift-wrapped with a red ribbon on my coffee table. I don’t control this information. I’ve been very, very fortunate after many years work to get access to some of it. And that’s what I’ve worked from, based on what I was given permission to know and see.”
If that sounds like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma it is no wonder. From the moment of Christ’s death, Mary Magdalene seems to evaporate from view. It was, in any case, a time of confusion and retribution. In a generally illiterate culture, stories were passed orally through the generations. On the few occasions they were written down, it was as a guide to preachers who in due course adapted them to their own needs. With information being in short supply, imaginations worked overtime and the bare bones of the Bible texts grew fleshy and fat with fanciful interpretations. What happened to Mary after the crucifixion and the resurrection nobody knows, but such gospels that have come to light in more recent times suggest she was a more forthright and charismatic person than the passive figure described by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
What is undeniable is that her life after Christ’s death was the subject of a vast number of myths which, says Susan Haskins, multiplied from the 11th century onwards, “many spawned by the arrival of her supposed relics in Burgandy”. It is believed - but unsubstantiated - that her travels took her to Asia Minor, Rome, and southern France. Various places - Palestine, Ephesus, Aix-en-Provenance - claim to be her place of death. In the most famous myth, Mary crosses the sea in a rudderless boat, having been set adrift by heathens. But for the timely intervention of God she and her companions would surely have drowned. Instead, she survived and disembarked at Marseilles. Worn out by her pastoral duties she retired to a cave in the mountains from where after 30 years she was transported “in ecstasy to heaven for a celestial repast”.
It was Pope Gregory - of Gregorian chant fame - who in the sixth century first asserted Mary was a prostitute, erroneously confusing her with another Mary. When such “facts” from such an authoritative source enter the cuttings file they invariably prove difficult to correct. Rare even today is the reference book that does not mention the words whore or harlot or prostitute. Mary, says one, epitomises the “archetypal repentant sinner”. She may, pronounces another, have been “the harlot whom Jesus rescued from an evil life”. None says she was married to Jesus and had his child and that she was the author of her own gospel, what Kathleen McGowan calls the Arques Gospel, after the town in which she claims it has now come to light and could only be found by “a woman of the bloodline who has been chosen by Magdalene herself”. If, against all the odds, that is indeed the case, the inhabitants of a small town in France near the southern border with Spain are about to find out what it means to be put on the pilgrim trail. May the Lord protect them.
The Expected One by Kathleen McGowan is published by Simon & Schuster, £10
30 July 2006
There’s something about Mary
The Da Vinci Code popularised the theory that Mary Magdalene married Jesus and bore his child. This wasn’t news to author Kathleen McGowan, who claims to have seen the proof … and to be Mary’s direct descendant. Alan Taylor hears her story
LIKE Martin Luther King, Kathleen McGowan had a dream. To be strictly accurate, she had “a series of haunting, recurring dreams that centred on the events and characters of the Passion”. In particular, Mary Magdalene, whom she refers to as “my muse, my ancestor”, appeared before her. In her new novel The Expected One, for which she has received a seven-figure advance, her heroine Maureen Pascal visits Jerusalem on Good Friday and has a vision of Mary. Exactly the same thing, McGowan insists, happened to her, since when she has had regular dreams and “waking visions”. She has become obsessed with Mary, “the most elusive character in the New Testament”.
McGowan has spent the past two decades in a quest to find out who she was and uncovering what she believes is the wilfully buried truth. Her mantra, like Maureen’s, is: “History is not what happened. History is what was written down.”
What most people know about Mary Magdalene is written down in the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which in total amounts to 14 niggardly mentions. All four gospels agree that she was present at the crucifixion and played a crucial role after Christ’s death. Though the details in each varies, all agree that Mary went to the tomb on the third day to anoint Christ’s body. They also agree that it was her that Christ, or an angel, told he was risen from the dead and to inform the disciples, thus making her the messenger who brought the news of the Resurrection, on which the cathedral of Christian faith is based. Without Mary Magdalene’s witness the past 2000 years would have been very different. Indeed, one could argue that without her Christianity would be meaningless.
But who was she and why did Christ put his trust in her? She is first mentioned in St Mark’s gospel, written around AD 66-8, which biblical scholars concur is the source for those of Luke and Matthew. As Mark describes the scene, Christ has just been crucified and deserted by his petrified male followers. He is alone on Calvary except for the “women looking on afar off”. Among those women is Mary, the mother of James; Salome, the exotic dancer; and Mary Magdalene. With others, they had followed Christ into Galilee and had “ministered unto him” and they now stood mourning him with the “many other women which came up with him into Jerusalem”.
It is, however, another reference in Mark’s gospel which Kathleen McGowan says has been “used against Mary” for two millennia: “Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.” This almost throwaway line, says McGowan, has led “to extreme claims about Mary’s mental state, including books dedicated to the idea that she was either possessed by demons or mentally ill”. It has also led to her frequent portrayal as a prostitute, largely due to her name being printed in such close proximity to the word “sinner” in Luke’s gospel. After all, unlike other women in the gospels, when she is identified it is not by a relationship with a man but by the place from which she comes, Magdala, a fishing village on the Sea of Galilee which, conveniently, had a reputation for loose living. Moreover, it seemed to suit the story that Christ, whose ministry was a byword in humility, should choose a fallen woman to proclaim his resurrection. For the church, it was interpreted as the ultimate act of forgiveness.
It was also, suggests McGowan, a historical injustice. For her, Mary is the first in a long line of women, including Marie Antoinette, Lucrezia Borgia, Boudicca and Mary, Queen of Scots, whom historians have defamed. Twenty years ago, McGowan began to research a book provisionally titled Maligned And Misunderstood, about women whose stories had been embellished and distorted mainly by male history makers.
“Many who did find their place in the history books were remembered as notorious villains - adulteresses, schemers, deceivers, even murderers,” writes McGowan in the afterword to The Expected One. “Were those characterisations fair, or were they political propaganda used to discredit women who dared to assert their intelligence and power? Armed with these questions and my escalating sense of mistrust for what has been academically accepted as historical evidence, I set out to write a book about infamous women who had been maligned and misunderstood through time.
“Mary Magdalene was initially just one of multiple subjects in my research. I set out to gain a greater awareness of this New Testament enigma in terms of her importance as a follower of Christ. I knew that the idea of Magdalene as a prostitute was prevalent in Christian society and that the Vatican had made some effort to correct that injustice. This was my starting point. It was my intention to incorporate Mary Magdalene’s story as one of many within the context of an entire body of literature that spanned 20 centuries. But Mary Magdalene had a different plan for me.”
By which McGowan means the visitations and dreams which she would have us believe made her the eponymous “expected one” to whom Mary would reveal her true story. And what a whopper it is. Kathleen McGowan’s Mary Magdalene is first married against her wishes to John the Baptist. When he is executed she marries Jesus, whom she calls Easa. She has two children, one by John - though he was not convinced he was the father. When Jesus dies on the cross she is carrying her second child and, presumably, his first.
McGowan believes that Magdalene was married to Jesus from the moment he was born, which must mean she was older than him. She was from the House of Benjamin, a descendant of Saul, making her the most important female in Israel. Under no circumstances, she says, was she a woman of easy virtue. “That was a later idea to disempower her and diminish the importance of women in the church.” Later, Mary went to live in the Languedoc region of France. Or so McGowan insists. Scholars, however, continue - as well they might - to be sceptical. Without printed proof their contempt for conspiracy theorists such as McGowan spreads like ivy.
Thanks to the indecent success of The Da Vinci Code, the news that Mary was married to Jesus and founded the Merovingian line will not make many headlines. Nor can there be any surprise about the centrality of Mary to the Bible story. As Susan Hawkins conceded in Mary Magdalen: The Essential History, she is “everywhere”, her name appropriated by Oxbridge colleges, East Lothian burns and innumerable chapels, hospitals and towns.
In the past decade-and-a-half, the literature concerning Mary Magdalene has expanded exponentially, including Claire Nahman and Margaret Bailey’s The Secret Teachings Of Mary Magdalene which includes “the last Gospel of Mary”; Bart Ehrman’s Peter, Paul And Mary Magdalene: The Followers Of Jesus In History And Legend; and countless Da Vinci Code spin-offs. In Norman Mailer’s Gospel According To The Son, she was the beautiful temptress of Christ and in Mimis Androulakis’s M To The Power Of N, He found her simply irresistible. In 2000, Maria Maddalena, a biopic, was shown on Italian television. Its heroine - disowned by her husband because she is infertile - becomes pregnant by another man but, on losing the child, attempts to commit suicide, after which she is redeemed by Christ.
Such poetic licence is perhaps inevitable because we know so little about Mary Magdalene. As Haskins notes: “The predominant image we have of her is of a beautiful woman with long golden hair, weeping for her sins, the very incarnation of the age-old equation between feminine beauty, sexuality and sin. For nearly 2000 years, the traditional conception of Mary Magdalene has been that of a prostitute who, hearing the words of Jesus Christ, repented of her sinful past and henceforth devoted her life and love to him. She appears in countless devotional images, scarlet-soaked and with loose hair, kneeling below the cross, or seated at Christ’s feet … or as the beauteous prostitute … sprawled at his feet. Her very name evokes images of beauty and sensuality, yet when we look for this creature in the New Testament, we look for her in vain.”
This, then, was McGowan’s starting point. How had Mary’s 14 mentions grown into such a fantastical legend? Cock-up? Conspiracy? The accumulation of circumstantial evidence accepted as fact? More often than not, says McGowan, it has to do with the way history is written and received. Sipping mineral water in a Dublin hotel, the bubbly mother of three sons, dressed in a cherry pashmina with her hair coloured to co-ordinate, recalls her experience in the late 1960s and 1970s when, as an idealistic young journalist, she moved to Ireland from Los Angeles to work as a reporter. What she saw with her own eyes, she says, often did not tally with what she read in the next day’s newspapers.
“You could read 10 different versions of the same event on the same day. I started to think, what happens if only one of those accounts survives? Or if one of those accounts has millions more readers than another? It becomes the truth. We’ve just made history. The more I thought about it, the more distressed I became.”
Talking to the families of the hunger strikers she came to realise how much of their history they kept to themselves, how much oral and traditional history was kept within a closed group, through suspicion of strangers and fear of being misrepresented and betrayed. History itself, she came to appreciate, was not to be trusted. Because you can authenticate documents does not mean you have an accurate picture of what happened in a given time and place. History was the prerogative of the wealthy, the powerful and the educated. “But that,” she says, “doesn’t tell us anything about the agenda of the person writing it.”
In the context of her research into Mary Magdalene, however, the authentification of documents is paramount. Though The Expected One is patently a novel, its USP is its author’s insistence that it is historically kosher and based on material which she has seen personally. In particular, she says she has been given access to Mary’s own gospel, which is not the same as that cited above by Nahman and Bailey.
“I was invited into the inner sanctum of secret societies,” relates McGowan, “and met with guardians of information so sacred that it astonishes me to this day that they, and the information they protect, exist - and have done so for 2000 years. I most certainly did not set out to explore issues that called into question the belief system of a billion people. It was never my intention to write a book that tackled a subject as weighty as the nature of Jesus Christ or his relationship with those closest in his life. Yet, like my protagonist, I discovered that sometimes our path is chosen for us. Once I discovered the Greatest Story Ever Told from Mary Magdalene’s perspective, I knew there would be no turning back. It possessed me then as it does to this day. I am certain that it always will.”
In essence, what McGowan set out to do - in a tale worthy of Indiana Jones - was reclaim Mary from the caricature contorted by history, the woman abused as a contrast to the saintly Madonna. But, as she is well aware, her reluctance - or inability - to be more forthcoming about the nature of her sources is manna to those who believe her story to be hokum. It was, she insists, not in her control. “I can’t produce the documents. I can’t walk in front of a camera and say, ‘Here they are’. I’m taking a lot of heat about that. What I said recently is that I don’t have these gift-wrapped with a red ribbon on my coffee table. I don’t control this information. I’ve been very, very fortunate after many years work to get access to some of it. And that’s what I’ve worked from, based on what I was given permission to know and see.”
If that sounds like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma it is no wonder. From the moment of Christ’s death, Mary Magdalene seems to evaporate from view. It was, in any case, a time of confusion and retribution. In a generally illiterate culture, stories were passed orally through the generations. On the few occasions they were written down, it was as a guide to preachers who in due course adapted them to their own needs. With information being in short supply, imaginations worked overtime and the bare bones of the Bible texts grew fleshy and fat with fanciful interpretations. What happened to Mary after the crucifixion and the resurrection nobody knows, but such gospels that have come to light in more recent times suggest she was a more forthright and charismatic person than the passive figure described by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
What is undeniable is that her life after Christ’s death was the subject of a vast number of myths which, says Susan Haskins, multiplied from the 11th century onwards, “many spawned by the arrival of her supposed relics in Burgandy”. It is believed - but unsubstantiated - that her travels took her to Asia Minor, Rome, and southern France. Various places - Palestine, Ephesus, Aix-en-Provenance - claim to be her place of death. In the most famous myth, Mary crosses the sea in a rudderless boat, having been set adrift by heathens. But for the timely intervention of God she and her companions would surely have drowned. Instead, she survived and disembarked at Marseilles. Worn out by her pastoral duties she retired to a cave in the mountains from where after 30 years she was transported “in ecstasy to heaven for a celestial repast”.
It was Pope Gregory - of Gregorian chant fame - who in the sixth century first asserted Mary was a prostitute, erroneously confusing her with another Mary. When such “facts” from such an authoritative source enter the cuttings file they invariably prove difficult to correct. Rare even today is the reference book that does not mention the words whore or harlot or prostitute. Mary, says one, epitomises the “archetypal repentant sinner”. She may, pronounces another, have been “the harlot whom Jesus rescued from an evil life”. None says she was married to Jesus and had his child and that she was the author of her own gospel, what Kathleen McGowan calls the Arques Gospel, after the town in which she claims it has now come to light and could only be found by “a woman of the bloodline who has been chosen by Magdalene herself”. If, against all the odds, that is indeed the case, the inhabitants of a small town in France near the southern border with Spain are about to find out what it means to be put on the pilgrim trail. May the Lord protect them.
The Expected One by Kathleen McGowan is published by Simon & Schuster, £10
30 July 2006